Rock Art Studies News of the World IV (original) (raw)
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Rock Art Studies. News of the World V
Edited by Paul Bahn, Natalie Franklin, Matthias Strecker and Ekaterina Devlet, 2016
Este libro recopila varios artículos de diversos especialistas en el tema del arte rupestre. Se menciona sobre la importancia del registro, fechamiento e interpretación de los grafismos rupestres, abordados en ocasiones por áreas culturales y estilos de representación.
Atelier Research Center for Conceptual Anthropology, 2019
Introduction In 1983, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) commissioned a World Report on the State of Research in Rock Art: the paintings and engravings in caves and on rock surfaces. It was the first attempt at a worldview on the most ancient art. After ten years, in 1993, another State of Research in Rock Art was commissioned by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS). In 2008, UNESCO commissioned another World Report on Rock Art to update the previous ones and to advise on the strategies for nomination of new rock art sites in the World Heritage List. Having been the author of these three reports, I had the opportunity to assess the enormous progress made by rock art studies in the last decades. From the first descriptive texts attempting inventories and dating to the elaborate studies on its contents and conceptual background, research on rock art is becoming a well-structured discipline. This paper presents the main evaluations from the three world reports. It is a short summary of some chapters of the book World Rock Art (E. Anati, 2015, Capodiponte, 5th revised edition, Atelier Edit), which presents a synthesis of the world reports. A new discipline is evolving, exploring the meaning of symbols, identifying the main types of syntaxes in rock art and looking at the future, analyzing what uses research in rock art might have and how rock art is contributing to world culture and to human sciences. The Australian Aborigines of Arnhem Land say that rock art tells us the story of ‘Dreamtime’. This is probably true for rock art everywhere. The Aborigines consider Dreamtime to be the time beyond our direct memory, the mythic age of creation. According to Aborigines, it includes true history. Recent events, like the arrival of newcomers or the events of the last few generations, are considered chronicles, rather than history. Rock art is the record of history beyonddirect memory, documenting whatever impressed and concerned the early ancestors. The pictographic and ideographic systems used in rock art are reminiscent of dreams. Written history came much later and concerns only a short time and a small part of humanity, the one that became urban and literate. The early systems of organized writing are just 5,000 years old, while the earliest figurative rock art is over 50,000 years old. Only 500 years ago, a large majority of humankind in five continents still used rock art as the main means of recording and this pattern had persisted for 50,000 years. A number of recurring elements, present in the rock art of all continents, indicate that the basic grammar and syntax respond to universal patterns of cognition, logic, and communication. Rock art appears as the expression of a primordial language of communication, with different dialects. It can be decoded and read disregarding the language in which one thinks and communicates. Theoretically, pictographic protoscript can be read and understood in any spoken and written language. Its reading requires, however, an acquaintance with its elementary associative and metaphorical systems. To reactivate the use of a method of pictographic and ideographic writing that can be read in any language in the world would open up a new horizon for human communication and may appear as a sort of utopia. And yet our cultural heritage is providing very old examples of successful attempts in communicating messages with figures and signs that can be understood in any language. The system applied by the rock art makers is simple and follows some elementary principles. The same kind of logic is widespread both geographically and chronologically, but each period and each culture have their own peculiarities. Such local features enable us to detect the common denominators. Could we reactivate primordial picture writing? How could linguists and epigraphers contribute to the progress of such a revolutionary concept? Rock art reveals the human capacities of abstraction, synthesis, and idealization. It describes economic and social activities, ideas, beliefs, and practices, providing unique insight into the intellectual life and cultural patterns of mankind. Long before the invention of methodical writing, rock art recorded the most ancient testimony of human imaginative and artistic creativity. It constitutes one of the most significant aspects of the commonheritage of humanity. Rock art may become a valuable source of touristic and economic development. For the administrators, these expected economic results are often more convincing than the cultural value of the sites. But it is an immense cultural heritage, a source of history, education, and scientific research.
Considerations on the Art and Aesthetics of Rock Art
The term 'rock art' is often used to refer to painting and engraving on rock. Many researchers qualify the term, while others refuse to associate the word 'art' with such painting and engraving. In the anthropological discourse of rock art there is a noticeable reluctance to associate prehistoric visual expression with art. The bases for this reluctance vary from researcher to researcher, but published comments revolve around a few general conceptions about art and aesthetics. These conceptions are grounded in the beliefs that art is a modern construct of Western civilization and that aesthetic sensibility played an insignificant role in the production and reception of prehistoric painting and engraving on rock. These beliefs, however, are based on uninformed ideas about art and aesthetics. The term 'rock art' is not only useful, it is appropriate.
Powerful Pictures: Rock Art Research Histories around the World
Focusing on stunning paintings and engravings from around the world, Powerful Pictures interrogates the driving forces behind global rock art research. Many of the rock art motifs featured in the 16 chapters of this book were created by indigenous hunter-gatherer groups, and it sheds new light on non-Western rituals and worldviews, many of which are threatened or on the point of extinction. Stemming from a conference in Val Camonica in northern Italy, the book is arranged by continent, although it tackles how early research in some countries (e.g., Sweden, France, Spain, the USA, Canada, South Africa) influenced the trajectory of archaeological investigations in others (e.g., Australia, India, Mexico, Germany, Mongolia, Russia). All of the contributing authors have vast experience working with rock art and Indigenous communities, many of them holding posts in prestigious university departments around the world. The book will be of particular interest to professional historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, and indeed anyone who is interested in art, symbolism, and the past.
Relating to Rock Art in the Contemporary World: Navigating Symbolism, Meaning, and Significance
Relating to Rock Art in the Contemporary World: Navigating Symbolism, Meaning, and Significance, 2016
I enjoyed this book a lot; much more, in fact, than I expected that I would. It does something that certainly has needed doing: it presents a global survey of some ways in which we, as contemporary living people, react to rock art and coordinate its management. The papers in this book touch on a great number of key issues that rock art researchers must address today and it does so in a cogent, if not always completely coherent, fashion. This is an achievement and all of the authors and editors are to be congratulated. There are several papers that I plan on integrating into my rock art research course syllabus and I am tempted to assign the whole book. The central theoretical point made by this book, and one expressed particularly well in the editors' introduction, is that rock art is not a static artifact but instead something that people react to continuously over long stretches of time, with reactions that often shift radically from one time, place, and/or cultural context to the next. Papers in this book scratch the surface of a vast and diverse range of subjects. Here are a few of the modern interactions with rock art presented in the book: rock paintings in Uganda that serve as a source of heritage and identity for groups who immigrated to the region relatively recently and likely did not make the rock paintings in question (Namono); an ongoing tradition of Bedouin rock engraving in the Negev Desert of Israel, where rock engraving has been used as a way of asserting tribal claims to territory over many centuries and where the earlier rock art traditions clearly played a key role in shaping later ones (Eisenberg-Degen, Nash, and Schmidt); cave paintings at Buddhist shrines in Thailand that evoke little interest or emotion in spite of their placement at places of religious worship (Tan et al.); changing public perceptions about the antiquity and value of early Holocene rock paintings in Spain and Argentina (Domingo and Bea; Fiore, Ocampo, and Acevedo); the latent racism and tackiness of modern consumer goods emulating rock art traditions in South Africa, Australia, and beyond (Smith; Tacon; Frederick) the roles of various government agencies and indigenous community groups in North America, Asia, and Australia in managing rock art sites and the social, economic, and religious interests associated with them (Norder and Zawadzka; Dongoske and Hays-Gilpin; Tacon; Cole); the transference of rock art traditions to new media and the quotation of rock art imagery for various artistic and political purposes (Smith; Tacon; Taylor; Frederick).
Theoretical approaches to rock art studies
Rock Art Research, 2016
To date most of the work in rock art studies has been done by archaeologists and anthropologists and so rock art research has mostly adopted theory related to historical contextualisation. Without playing down the contribution of archaeology and anthropology, i examine the theoretical basis of historical approaches before going on to assessments of non-historical or universalist approaches (those of structuralism and, more recently, the 'phosphene' hypothesis-both in its shamanic and non-shamanic versions). Finally, i give an account of my own approach which is applicable not only to rock art but to art in general, and in that respect has relevance to the discipline of art history. Specifically this approach involves a combination of phenomenology, cognitive science and neurophysiology. phenomenology, or the analysis of phenomena, provides a philosophical framework for the discussion of rock art from the standpoint of visual perception. at the same time cognitive science (in the form of perceptual psychology) and neurophysiology (knowledge of the neural structures of visual perception) provide experimental support for phenomenological analysis. Without excluding other approaches, this one seeks to offer yet another basis for a universalist rather than a historically oriented line on rock art studies.